Conventional breast pumps are typically designed to engage with a bottle. The bottle will often screw into the bottom of the breast pump, and expressed breast milk is pumped directly from the breast, through the breast shield of the breast pump, and into the bottle. However, such bottles are not commonly used for long term storage of the breast milk. Rather, breast milk is usually poured from the bottle into a more long-term storage container—typically, a plastic freezer bag specifically designed for breast milk storage. The bag of milk is then frozen for future use. However, this process can be cumbersome and messy, and can often result in the loss of some breast milk from spillage during the transfer process between bottle and storage bag. Additionally, the bottle itself requires cleaning, which adds an extra step to the entire process.
Existing prior art systems have tried to do away with the need for the bottle by pumping breast milk directly into a storage bag. However, such prior art systems suffer from various flaws, including unstable attachment points, incompatibility with various models of breast pumps, likelihood for spillage, etc.